Triple Bottom Line is good for our mental health

"The Triple Bottom Line," often called the "Integrated Bottom Line," captures an expanded spectrum of values and criteria for measuring organizational (and societal) success: economic, ecological and social. Also known as "People, Planet, Profit", it is a term that has been adopted by the United Nations and provides a comprehensive view of true success in the 21st Century.

Widespread implementation of environmentally sustainable practices, technologies, and education will be crucial to the creation of a triple bottom line world. As we enter into a deeper global environmental crisis, our need for fundamental changes and restructuring becomes imperative. Social equity, environmental sustainability and economic profit are the ends and means by which to solve much of the widespread "dis-ease" that we see today.

Industrialization has brought us many wonderful additions to the human experience, including technology, motorized travel, and medical advances that have radically altered how we live, think, and interact. Yet, when we gaze around our world and the challenges that this "progress" has created, industrialization can feel as destructive as it does helpful. Our minds, emotions and nervous systems cannot always keep pace with the innovations that we have been able to create. Within this gap lies a great deal of mental health symptomatology that can be addressed using wisdom from mental health healing traditions that seek to help the human mind adapt and adjust to new circumstances.

Building triple bottom line projects is an efficient way to create environmental sustainability while helping societal needs and addressing mental health of the general population and those who are traditionally identified as "mentally ill." Often, we create the world we inhabit using "silo thinking" rather than "integrative thinking," when in fact, nature creates its models of life based on systems that nest within each other. This interdependence creates an opportunity for robust ecological systems to be created and thrive where linear models stall and disappoint.

Hopelessness and helplessness are two of the largest components of mental illness. Many are experiencing emotional symptoms in response to their worries about pollution, climate change, and decreased access to the natural world. Many people with psychiatric conditions of all kinds lead positive, productive and satisfying lives. They often do so by finding a way to live in concert with who they are within the world around them. As a sense of purpose, self-esteem and mastery increase, mental illness shifts to mental health. Just as these individuals create gratifying lives by positively shaping the worlds they live in, we have the opportunity to create the same positive outcomes on a much larger scale. By making environmental sustainability projects happen, hope for our future increases, as well as a sense that who we are and what we do really matter.

...The ways in which the implementation of a integrated bottom line can be a treatment unto itself, in that it is a process that can provide an increased sense of emotional containment, mastery, hope and resilience.

...Large scale capacity to address climate change

...How access to nature is a necessity for children's mental health and learning potential.

...How anxiety and terror about environmental degradation are worsening global mental functioning and leading to a rise in mental illness.

...How we have created a world in which both humans and things can be thought of as "garbage," and how to recreate a world that appreciates the reality that "there is no 'away'"

... How concepts such as "digesting" difficult emotional states can create an opportunity to "compost" impasses and create meaningful change.

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